Comment 1 for bug 1206753

The buttons in the find panel are the cause of the widths. The package from https://launchpad.net/~sinzui/+archive/ppa (sudo apt-add-repository ppa:sinzui/ppa) was restructured to be narrower. There are no widths set in the UI. The size is determined from the font size, actual words, and padding for the buttons. The narrower version of the find panel uses terse text.

In the example of the syntax checker shown in the link, I think bug 459328 would indirectly solve the issue. The intent is to place warnings and errors in the document gutter instead of the sidebar.